I have a lot of experience with Arc, Scheme, and Common Lisp, and I find Arc significantly more pleasant to program in. When I have to shift into Scheme (some parts of Arc are written in Scheme), it feels like there is a lot of extra drag.
It was noticing this difference that made me decide Arc was ready to release. If it (a) felt significantly better to me, who (b) am experienced with existing Lisp dialects, and (c) writing a type of application (HN) that's not wildly specialized, then it had the "quantum of utility" I usually use as the test for releasing a version 1.
Any chance of releasing a book or spec alongside Arc at some point? Or are you encouraging people to just play around with it for now? I'm just wondering whether the idea here is to encourage exploration through scarcity, or that there's insufficient resources to produce the documentation, or if it's just too early on at this stage.
Paul, you're fit to prefer Arc over the rest because: 1) you're an experienced Lisper, and 2) it's your own creation, you know it inside and out and the language spec, manual, tutorial and research papers are somewhere between your ears (the most convenient type of bookshelf ;-)
However, it's IMO, unacceptable for a fairly new Lisp programmer to cast aside 50 years of Lisp research, development and deployment while brushing aside the industry's backbone languages, and herald Arc as the best thing ever when it isn't even finished.
I can accept personal choice and opinion, if kept to one's self and made in private. Even if someone sings Arc, or Clojure or Common Lisp or Scheme, praises, I am fine with it. But to say "Languages X, Y, Z suck because they don't allow me to write succinct programs", well, you're just trolling for X, Y and Z programmers to come out and straighten you out. The sort of macrology he is after (code-compacting type, not language extension) is pretty basic and could be done with the C pre-processor and M4. You can even write compact assembly programs with GASP, HLA, and NASM macros; it's not rocket science.
I reserve my judgment for Arc until it's done. There is no manual yet to hold the compiler accountable, and to save me from guess-work. However, what I can't ignore is blind fanboyism; if everybody here sang Arc praises, when it is just arc-tutorial.txt and arc.arc, and there were no "dissenting" honest voices, well, the place just wouldn't be the same.
I think you're being unnecessarily argumentative in this discussion. The author likes Arc, feel is makes him more productive, and he wanted to share that with the community.
He did not say other languages suck. What he said was he prefers Arc over those languages, and explained why.
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I have a lot of experience with Arc, Scheme, and Common Lisp, and I find Arc significantly more pleasant to program in. When I have to shift into Scheme (some parts of Arc are written in Scheme), it feels like there is a lot of extra drag.
It was noticing this difference that made me decide Arc was ready to release. If it (a) felt significantly better to me, who (b) am experienced with existing Lisp dialects, and (c) writing a type of application (HN) that's not wildly specialized, then it had the "quantum of utility" I usually use as the test for releasing a version 1.
Hi Paul,
Any chance of releasing a book or spec alongside Arc at some point? Or are you encouraging people to just play around with it for now? I'm just wondering whether the idea here is to encourage exploration through scarcity, or that there's insufficient resources to produce the documentation, or if it's just too early on at this stage.
That's one of the things I'm going to do next.
Paul, you're fit to prefer Arc over the rest because: 1) you're an experienced Lisper, and 2) it's your own creation, you know it inside and out and the language spec, manual, tutorial and research papers are somewhere between your ears (the most convenient type of bookshelf ;-)
However, it's IMO, unacceptable for a fairly new Lisp programmer to cast aside 50 years of Lisp research, development and deployment while brushing aside the industry's backbone languages, and herald Arc as the best thing ever when it isn't even finished.
I can accept personal choice and opinion, if kept to one's self and made in private. Even if someone sings Arc, or Clojure or Common Lisp or Scheme, praises, I am fine with it. But to say "Languages X, Y, Z suck because they don't allow me to write succinct programs", well, you're just trolling for X, Y and Z programmers to come out and straighten you out. The sort of macrology he is after (code-compacting type, not language extension) is pretty basic and could be done with the C pre-processor and M4. You can even write compact assembly programs with GASP, HLA, and NASM macros; it's not rocket science.
I reserve my judgment for Arc until it's done. There is no manual yet to hold the compiler accountable, and to save me from guess-work. However, what I can't ignore is blind fanboyism; if everybody here sang Arc praises, when it is just arc-tutorial.txt and arc.arc, and there were no "dissenting" honest voices, well, the place just wouldn't be the same.
I think you're being unnecessarily argumentative in this discussion. The author likes Arc, feel is makes him more productive, and he wanted to share that with the community.
He did not say other languages suck. What he said was he prefers Arc over those languages, and explained why.
I realized that pretty much by now. I had a WTF moment earlier and wished I had spent those few hours I spent on this thread doing something else.
Lesson learned. Modded you up for the truth. Thank you :-)